


Heal Over

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: 413, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Not Humanstuck, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Potential Canonical Divergence, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 04:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6550066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack wakes up and Ms. Paint is not there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heal Over

It’s a night months after the win when you awaken to find that her bed empty. Upon having tentatively lived in the same can with one another for months, you’ve grown used to her turning on the lights in the other rooms during the witching hours. Cleaning, perhaps, fixing something, or sometimes creating art that is always hidden away by the time the daylight comes. However, there are no lights on when you open your eyes, no flitting of her pale, almost ghostly form in the doorways. Across from you, Paint’s sleeping place gapes emptily at you with its lack of occupance. You are alone.  
  
Slowly, you swing your legs over the side of your own bed, eyes adjusting to the darkness. It’s vague, a hazy memory in the back of your mind, but you think that the click of the latch is what roused you. For a second, you watch the door to the outside, somehow still uncertain of her departure in your freshly awoken state. Perhaps, you think, she’ll walk back in through that entry right now. She’ll go back to small tasks, go back to bed, come to you as you’ve thought about so many times before. But she doesn’t, and another second of shocking clarity wipes the sleep from your eyes and drives you to your feet. You have to find her.  
  
So you go to the door and open it with a swift purposefulness, one that you don’t realize you still possess. In your eyes, the loss of your arm has made you an graceless invalid, incapable of regaining the intimidation you’d one had as a leader. You don’t know that your loping, angry stride makes you just as much of a presence on the dark road as it ever did on Derse, and you never will. You do know, however, that the mailwoman is watching you before you even look. Her gaze follows that distinctive spot you hold in space, just as it has many times before. You know the prickle of it on your back, despite not knowing that it’s your everlasting predatory aura that draws her to you.  
  
You don’t know where to search already, and you know that spinning about fruitlessly in circles isn’t going to get you anywhere. Paint’s not in town. You know it in your gut, that infamous Noir instinct that has driven you in making nearly all of your decisions. So you turn around, body tensely wary with your eyes narrowing into slits. PM is standing, tall and straight and regal, in such a pose that you can almost see the wings still flaring behind her as they once did. She never fails to scare you, though you won’t ever admit it--the expression on her face has such fury in it sometimes that you think she might still smite your sorry ass into the ground. Keeping your position a good ten feet away from her, you ask if she’s seen Paint. She steps nearer to you without saying a word and your muscles all grow taut at once. Then she stops, making some decision in her head, looking worn and thin like a knife that has been sharpened one too many times. Pointing off somewhere slightly behind her, into the hilly forests, she indicates the location of a winding path that both you and her know Paint frequents during the day. She tells you that if you move swiftly she’s certain you can catch up. You missed Ms. Paint by about a minute.  
  
Muttered gratitude slips out of your mouth and you quickly step around her, but you catch her eye as you pass. It always shocks her how much sorrow she can convey in one glance. It’s not that she means to, you don’t think, it’s simply a trait that comes with one who’s witnessed the things that she has. You’re all too aware that there’s not enough remorse in the world, let alone in your cold and bitter shell, that could reassure her. Not for what you’ve done. So you don’t try, you simply show her a complete respect that you know takes the strength of a thousand men for her to reciprocate. You almost find an unknown force--an apology, another thanks, gratitude for sparing you, something--emerging from deep within you, but the hesitation it causes in you is only a stutter in an otherwise uninterrupted movement. You leave her in the darkness behind you.  
  
It’s a beautiful night, filled with frog song and softly warm breezes. However, even with the smell of rich earth and vegetation gracing the air, the stars are cold and uncaring diamonds in the rich bluish-black above you as you hurry along the path. You don’t know why that one detail strikes you so heavily. As you move, you find yourself weighed down by the weight of all those stars, threatening to shatter your spine under the load. With an almost pained squint, you search through the dim light for a glimpse of your destination, and find it despite the blinding nature of your strange burden. An open space, a flash of white, and more open expanse of sky that bears scores of those apathetic jewels, stretching out into vast infinity.  
  
It’s a hill, grassy and steep-sloped, edged with a thick treeline that you emerge from, out into the open. Ms. Paint sits with her back to the magnificent view of the lower valley, pin-pricked sky soaring over her, head in her hands. Instantly, you rush over to her, kneeling at her side, but you don’t touch her. You’ve never been able to make a move, not in all the time that you two have dwelled together. It’s as if you’re planets orbiting a common point, drawn by the same force, seeing and interacting with one another without meeting. This distance has had you nervously skirting around her, with her own space being unfathomably unreachable, tantalizingly close and producing an uncertainty in you that you’d never felt prior to this.  
  
Which is why it startles you when she suddenly clings to you, sobbing against your chest with the fabric of the front of your clothes clenched in tight fists.  
  
You didn’t know him. No matter how much you think about it, you’re incapable of mourning for him. All you know is that the tears on her beautiful face, the ones that wash heart-breaking trails down the smooth shell of her cheeks, are for him. All you know is that it tears you apart to see her cry, and that you can’t stop her pain, no matter how many times you swear to that you’ll try. She especially out anyone on this fucking planet doesn’t deserve to hurt. Pressing your hand against the small of her back, you wish desperately that you could do more. You say that you’re sorry, not even knowing what you’re saying it for--perhaps just a general sorry for the sheer amount of lives that you stole, or a sorry for the ones she’s lost, or a sorry for area you take up with your miserable life. It doesn’t really matter, you don’t think, what you’re saying it for, so long as she’s okay.  
  
After a little while, she pulls away, wiping at her eyes with trembling hands. Her dark eyes look into your own and hold you captive, still wet and grief-filled. You say something, barely even hearing your own words, about how you’ve lost some people too. There’s no follow up, and once you speak you can’t remember exactly what was said, but you hope it’s good enough. You’ve never been exactly an ace at all this redrom shit. Not with your long-dead moirail, and certainly not with your feelings for PM. It requires too much thought, too much caring for you to have ever longed for it, and words that deliver that sort of care have never been the kind to come quickly to your tongue.  
  
But apparently she finds solace in what you’ve told her, because she leans in and presses her mouth to yours in a simple, tender and utterly flooring gesture. The two planets collide, creating a beautifully cataclysmic event that, in one moment, takes up your entire world. It’s more heart-breaking than you ever imagined it, especially when you thought your heart was impossible to do anything of the sort to. You embrace it wholly, hand brushing against her neck, and she presses so close against you that you think you could become one body. When the two of you part, your pulse is racing along like the feet of an army, and you can feel hers matching your beneath your fingers.  
  
That night is the night you start sharing a bed.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy end of Homestuck, everyone.


End file.
